Department of ENGLISH College of Arts and Sciences Newsletter 2015/2016 Dear friends, indicates the extraordinary range of your accomplishments. Do send us news Yes, I’m back! Graham Hammill, after about your work and your life changes. two years of chairing the English Department The Department is immensely grateful to alumnus Louis Slovinsky superbly, has accepted an appointment as (BA, 1961) 1937-2012, and his wife Joan Slovinsky, who for the past five years Dean of the Graduate School. Congratulations have provided a $10,000 Louis and Joan Slovinsky Dissertation Fellowship for to Graham! I am serving as Interim Chair for English graduate students. 2015-16 is the last year of this fellowship bequest. 2015-16. We hope very much that one of our alums will step forward to continue this As you will read in the pages following, annual gift—so crucial to enabling a graduate student to finish his or her some of the highlights of the past year in dissertation more quickly and to be more successful on the still extremely this Department include the hire of Assistant challenging academic job market. Professor Elizabeth Mazzolini in the field of 2015-16 is the year of anniversaries. Under the co-direction of Barbara Rhetoric of Science and the Environment - Bono, the Early Modern Research Workshop is staging “Buffalo Bard 2016: read more about her work on page 3. Hiring 400 Years Since Shakespeare,” starting in January, with several performances Elizabeth led to the bonus of hiring her husband, and events in collaboration with Buffalo institutions, from Nichols School to the Associate Professor Chad Lavin, who works in political theory and the history Buffalo Philharmonic. Just Buffalo Literary Center—the premier community of ideas (see page 3). Damien Keane was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize center for the literary arts in Western New York, founded and continuously by the American Conference for Irish Studies for his new publication Ireland directed by English UB alums—turns 40 and is launching various events. And and the Problem of Information (see page 3). Two faculty members enjoyed the Department’s Poetics Program turns 25 and will sponsor several events prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships over the past year—Jerold Frakes and throughout the year, including the first annual Robert Creeley Lecture and Carla Mazzio—and I was privileged to enjoy an ACLS Fellowship. Nnedi Celebration of Poetry, at the Albright-Knox Gallery, April 8, and an academic Okorafor (hired in 2014) published a new novel, The Book of the Phoenix, and conference April 9-10 (see page 6). was a finalist for several international prizes, including the British Science We’re also hosting a Second Alumni/ae Reunion—to coincide with the Fiction Association Award. And Walt Hakala was awarded the Edward Creeley Lecture and Celebration for Poetry and Poetics conference: April 8-9. Cameron Dimrock, Jr., Prize by the American Institute of Indian Studies for Come for a day or the whole weekend. For all these events, watch for details an outstanding book manuscript. As even this short list indicates, our faculty on our website, Facebook page, and in your email. continue to produce original, provocative, rigorous scholarship and creative writing. We face several challenges this year—having to do with local and national shifts in student enrollment and with defining our place in the new UB General Our students are similarly impressive in their creativity and Education Program. Among other things, you’ll hear about how the Department accomplishments. Graduate student Marion Quirici was awarded both an is moving forward in these areas during the Reunion. At the same time, we are AAUW Dissertation Fellowship and a Krause Research Fellowship in Irish looking forward to another busy, exciting, creative year. I hope to see many Studies for her work in Irish and Disability studies. This year two of our of you at the Reunion or other events and would love to hear your questions, undergraduate majors received the prestigious SUNY Chancellor’s Award for memories of the department, and ideas for where we might go next. Student Excellence—John O’Brien and Chelsea Reinhart. John O’Brien was also awarded the Outstanding Senior in English award. Cordially, The increasingly long “Alumni News” feature is a joy to read! Not only Cristanne Miller does it show that more and more of you are staying in touch with us but it also

Many generous alums designate their annual University giving to the English Department. We are grateful for their donations, which support student tuition, student research projects, dissertation and travel fellowships for graduate students, and English Department programs. What's on our wish list right now? • Funds to support graduate student research and dissertation writing. The department has come to the end of a 5-year dissertation-fellowship gift; we would like to replace it to continue funding an exceptional student in his or her final year of work on the dissertation. • Funds to support undergraduate education through small achievement awards, trips to performances, technologically enhanced classrooms, special opportunity workshops • Funds to support a Robert Creeley lecture series in Poetics How to Make a Gift: If you would like to support the Department, you can designate the English Department when responding to any of the University fund-raising efforts. You can also send a check payable to UB Foundation, Inc., indicating “Department of English” on the memo line. Checks should be sent to Cindy Johannes, University at Buffalo Foundation, PO Box 730, Buffalo, NY 14226-0730, phone: 716-645-8720. Or you can donate through the English Department’s website: http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english.html by clicking on “Giving to UB.” We appreciate all donations – from the smallest to the largest amounts. Since there are over 7,500 English alums, $10 and $25 gifts do add up. Thank you for your support and continued interest in UB’s Department of English!

In This Issue: Graduation Ceremony May 2015...... 7 Alumni/ae News...... 12, 13, 14 Current Trends; Featured Faculty...... 2 Undergraduate Student News...... 8, 9 Emeriti; In Memoriam...... 15 Faculty News...... 3, 4, 5 Graduate Student News...... 10 Recommended Reading; Department News...... 5 Reading for Better Health(Care); Upcoming Events...... 16 Program Director Notes; Alumni Reunion �������������� 6 Featured Alumnus...... 11 Current Trends

uninhabited deserts. In the past decade, reinforcements of the U.S. Customs Migration Nation and Border Protection have pushed migrants into the Sonoran Desert, one by Joseph Conte, Professor of the most desolate sections of the border. In the Sonoran Desert’s extreme climate, temperatures reach as high as 118°F and then drop suddenly to 50°F In September 2014 Tanya Shilina-Conte, Lecturer in the Department of overnight. Although the Sonoran Desert is one of the deadliest stretches of Media Study, and I held a public screening in the UB Center for the Arts of a land on the planet, economic needs and familial desires continue to beckon recently released film that deals with the crisis of immigration on our southern people to take the ultimate gamble. While attempts to cross into the United border with Mexico, Who Is Dayani Cristal?, directed by Mark Silver and star- States have dropped, deaths have risen. Since 1998, more than two thou- ring Gael García Bernal. The event kicked off the first annual Buffalo Humani- sand corpses in varying states of decay have been found in Arizona’s Sonora ties Festival, whose theme was “Migration Nation Moving Stories.” We felt Desert—the remains of “border crossers” who perished en route to the United moved to discuss this story, which is partly a CSI-like effort to give a name to States. the remains of a migrant found in the unforgiving Sonoran desert in Arizona, whose only identifying feature was the tattoo “Dayani Cristal.” Who Is Dayani Cristal? is a “docufiction” film—the fabricated recreation of actual events—that follows two parallel narratives. In one, director Marc As an immigrant from Russia and the descendent of immigrants from the Silver unravels the mystery of an undocumented worker from Latin America, “mezzogiorno” of Italy and Sicily, respectively, Tanya and I have been especial- found dead after crossing the border into the U.S., identifiable only by the ly attuned to the diverse cultures and identities that are uncovered in the many tattoo on his chest. In the other, actor Gael García Bernal (well known for his migration stories tagged with such adjectives as illegal, nonimmigrant, undocu- performances in such films as Y tu mamá también and The Motorcycle Diaries) mented, nameless, invisible, unidentified and missing. The topic of immigration makes the same journey himself, traveling through Mexico alongside other and migration has occupied the headlines in recent global and national news: men on “The Beast,” el tren de la muerte, on their way to America. There is yet the tragic drowning of more than 500 migrants in 2015 from countries such a third implied story in which we as viewers are also invited on this perilous as Eritrea, Sudan, Libya and Syria on their way to Malta or Lampedusa in the trip to experience what it feels like to be a migrant. If you view this film, you Mediterranean in order to escape sectarian violence and starvation; the still will understand how utterly defamatory were the recent comments regarding pending passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Mexican migrants by a Republican presidential candidate who deserves to Minors (or DREAM) Act, first introduced in Congress in 2001; objections to the remain unnamed. Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which grants temporary legal status to those who have spent the majority of their life I’ll be screening Who Is Dayani Cristal? and reading works of fiction and in the U.S.; and the 2014 American immigration crisis—in which xenophobic nonfiction that portray the immigrant experience, such as Anzia Yezierska’s protesters in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas attempted to “Shut novel Bread Givers (1925), Jerre Mangione’s memoir of the Sicilian enclave of Down All Ports Of Entry” in response to the surge in unaccompanied children Rochester, NY, Mount Allegro (1989), and Gary Shteyngart’s autobiographical from Central America (numbering more than 52,000) seeking asylum in the account of Soviet-era migration of Russian Jews to New York, Little Failure United States under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection (2014), in my online undergraduate course in Fall 2015, English 447: Literature Reauthorization Act of 2008, signed into law by George W. Bush. of Migration. These and other works are also featured in my essay-in-progress, “Immigration Literature and the Alien Nation,” which argues that the fiction The border patrol sign in California near the Mexican border issues a warn- and memoirs of immigrants, deemed “alien residents” not yet “naturalized” in ing: “Caution! Do not expose your life to the elements. It’s not worth it!” The American language or customs, describe the strange shores on which they Mexico–United States border, the most frequently crossed international border arrive as the alien nation. in the world, traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from major urban areas to Featured Faculty -Dimitri Anastasopoulos Associate Chair Stacy Hubbard sat down with Associate Professor Dimitri DA: Some writers, like Nabokov, I’ve tried my best to disavow (because of Anastasopoulos to talk about his fiction and teaching. their postmodern influence) but I have found difficulty burying them. Kafka and Clarice Lispector were big early influences. My two biggest influences SH: You were born in Athens, Greece and grew up in Virginia and Con- have been Marcel Proust and Thomas Bernhard. JG Ballard as well. Over the necticut. How important is your Greek heritage to the fiction you write? last year, I have read and reread Anais Nin, Peter Handke and Gayl Jones DA: I’ve written very little about Greek ethnicity itself, but the themes of migra- because of their focus on self-description relative to stock formulations. This tion, displacement, translation, dislocation, and cultural nomadism are there. I summer I read several fictions that incorporated political discourse by Percival suppose that all of these can be considered part of the immigrant experience Everett, Antoine Volodine and Karen Yamashita, as well as the translation of even if never explicitly evoked as part of an immigrant or ethnic narrative. Julio Cortazar’s very weird book Fantomas and the Multinational Vampires: an SH: Your novels (A Larger Sense of Harvey, Farm for Mutes) have been Attainable Utopia. described as existential, postmodern or deconstructive. Do any of these SH: You write both fiction and critical prose. Do you find that one kind of labels seem right to you? How would you describe your style? writing informs the other, or that one interferes with the other? DA: I don’t mind these labels except perhaps deconstructive, which to me DA: I believe very few fiction writers do both, or can do both well, or at the implies a method or system that I simply don’t see in my work. It may be there. same time. They do interfere. Perhaps Nathaniel Mackey is the fiction writer In contrast, postmodern and existential seem more like categories, difficult to most capable since he reserves a space for literary criticism, music criticism, argue against. I might prefer to say that I am very interested in the differences and critical theory in his fiction. They “sit in” with one another, to use his phrase. and similarities between public discourse and private language, between stock . . .Your question has fascinated me in the past. I’ve devoted a grad seminar to formulas and style. I see my fiction as mainly rhetorical, and though influenced it and may do so again in the future, by looking at critical essays by Nabokov, by the moderns and postmoderns, not really wedded to those historical move- Samuel Beckett, Helene Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Mackey, etc., alongside ments. their fiction. SH: Your fiction brings in elements of science, science fiction, linguistics, SH: You teach creative writing courses for both undergraduate and gradu- film history and international culture. What else influences your writing? ate students. To what extent do you think young writers can be taught? DA: I am exploring some of these things yet again in my current novel. The DA: Writers can be taught that they have great powers of the imagination (Paul dominance of science and technology in contemporary life seems to be an in- West’s influence!) if they are encouraged to believe that. . . .Writers can be escapable feature of most fiction today. Mine as well. Currently, I am interested given license to play with language and see how much more pliable it is in the in similarities between political narratives and the literary, between well consti- workshop space than it is elsewhere in their daily lives, and in this way, the tuted fields such as economics and the reduction of those fields in political and workshop expands language for students beyond even what they might believe cultural discourse. My current novel is about the Greek economic crisis and the is permissible in the solitude of their own work. . . .I believe that writers rarely dangerous adventures of small American tourist children in Greek villages. An know what they are doing, so the attempt to control the work’s meaning or to autofiction that unreservedly—so far—incorporates my own blog-style analysis assess what has been learned, practiced, and executed can only lead young of whatever is currently happening in Greece. writers astray. SH: Who are your favorite novelists, the ones who give you the most plea- SH: Thank you for talking with us. sure or whose style you admire? For a longer version of this interview, go to www.english.buffalo.edu

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Damien Keane awarded the 2015 Robert Rhodes Prize Associate professor Damien Keane’s book Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (Penn State UP, 2014) has been awarded the 2015 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. The study approaches this question: what aspects of the Irish historical experiences of anti-colonial revolution, non-aligned diplomatic status, and peripheral underdevelopment make it a useful test case for conditions now more commonly associated with “globalization”? With an itinerary moving not simply among Dublin, Belfast, and London, but Paris, New York, Addis Ababa, Rome, Berlin, Geneva, and the world’s radio receivers, the book considers how the manipulation and re-direction of literary expression came to reflect not only the immense totality of total war, but literature’s increasingly explicit position among – rather than above or apart from – technological media of transmission and reception. Praising the analysis of “the complicated ways that information circulates through various media,” the ACIS prize committee underscored the book’s contribution to the field of modern Irish Studies: “Keane offers readers fresh archival material and astute close readings to success- fully undermine long-standing assessments of this period as one characterized by Irish inwardness and exceptionalism. He insists that Irish modernism was disseminated not only by literary texts but also by global networks of communication, and draws attention to the influence of these networks on late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, Walter Starkie, and Francis Stuart. By offering an innovative approach to long-standing concerns in Irish Studies, Ireland and the Problem of Information demonstrates the real value of transnational studies to the field more generally.” The Rhodes Prize is the most prestigious annual award presented by ACIS.

Getting Ready for “Buffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare” 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s of the Shrew. death. But during that year all the world will be a Events will include a stellar three-part academic conference at UB on “Ob- stage commemorating his life. ject and Adaptation: The Worlds of Shakespeare and Cervantes”; additional Here in Western New York we will join the theatrical, musical, dance and film interpretations, including a free “side-by- celebrations with a year-long calendar of public side” concert featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Buffalo humanities events: “Buffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Academy of the Visual and Performing Arts; a planetarium show at SUNY Since Shakespeare.” Buffalo State on “Shakespeare and the Stars”; a Shakespeare Read-A-Thon; Against a backdrop of major library exhibits of the launch of a “Shakespeare Garden” at the Karpeles Manuscript Library; early Folios and other rare materials at both the book and stage-lovers’ tours; and even an April 27th visit, courtesy of the UB downtown Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Distinguished Speakers’ Series, from Shakespearean actor and Academy and up at UB there will be classes and participa- Award-winner Kevin Spacey. Finally, there will be a Jubilee Gala, MCed by tory events such as competitions, festivals, and book-making sessions for UB English Department Professor and UB Dean of Undergraduate Education students from all of the “Seven Ages of Man,” infancy to old age. Dr. Andrew McConnell Stott, echoing the famous Garrick Jubilee of 1769 that made Stratford a tourist site and Shakespeare a national and international There will also be a new stage for the 41st season of “Shakespeare in icon. Delaware Park,” featuring a reprise of their very first production, the heart- rending and magical The Winter’s Tale, and the crowd-pleasing The Taming Most of these events are free and open to the public, or involve a nominal cost. Read about them in detail at buffalobard.wordpress.com.

Welcome New Faculty Members.... Elizabeth Mazzolini Chad Lavin (PhD, 2006, Penn State University) (PhD, 2003, Penn State University) “My research is about humanistic interpreta- tions of science and technology, especially as “Most broadly, I study the history of ideas related to the environment. So, my book The – ideas like responsibility, citizenship, and Everest Effect, out next year, is about how the humanity – to see how the meaning of these sciences and technologies that support high ideas changes, and how they afford people altitude mountaineering work persuasively distinct ways of being in the world. My to shape the ideas and values that have animated climbs. My new project investigates research and my teaching are interdisciplin- links between environmentalism and poverty ary; I like mixing genres of thought and in the U.S., and also considers environmental- writing, reading novels alongside Supreme ism alongside disability studies, in order to draw out what effects Court decisions to see how people think are produced from different uses of the idea of “nature.” This new about property, or self-help books alongside management theory project extends some work I started when I co-edited Histories of the to trace changing ideas about achievement. I am currently at Dustheap, an interdisciplinary volume on the topic of garbage. work on a manuscript about the interface of ethics, politics, and I teach classes that encourage humanists and environmentalists to economics, and smaller projects focusing on spatial metaphors in critique the sciences but also to find joy and power in them, such as Science Writing, Feminist Science Studies, and the Environmental political thought and the nature of whistleblowing in an information Humanities.” economy.“

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AWARDS / PROMOTIONS Rachel Ablow, Associate Professor, received a Conversations in the Disciplines Award from the State University of New York for the Pain conference she is organizing for the Humanities Institute in October, entitled “Harriet Martineau and the Subject of Pain.” Victorian Studies 56.4 (Summer 2014): 675-97. Dave Alff, Assistant Professor,has been awarded a Summer NEH Fellowship for 2015. (See page 5 for details.) Walt Hakala, Assistant Professor, has been awarded the Edward C. Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities for his manuscript (currently under review), “Negotiating Terms: Urdu Dictionaries and the Definition of Modern South Asia.” The Dimock prize is awarded annually by the American Institute of Indian Studies. He was awarded the OVPRED/HI Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities fund for 2015, and a University at Buffalo College Faculty Fellow, 2015-17. Judith Goldman, Assistant Professor, was awarded one of two OVPRED/HI Fellows in 2015-16, for her work entitled, ____ Mt. [blank mount]. Steve McCaffery, Professor, is the recipient of the Dora Mavor Moore award for Outstanding Sound Design and Composition General Theatre Category for The Four Horseman Project, which was received in Toronto, Ont., Canada this summer. Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor, has received an award from the Innovative Micro-Programs Accelerating Collaboration in Themes (IMPACT) to support her team’s proposal titled “Marianne Moore Archive (MMA): Notebooks Project.” Steven Miller, Associate Professor, is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching; he is one of only three faculty at UB to receive the award this year. The award is based on syllabi and letters from departmental colleagues, external writers, and students. Well-known and well-regarded as rigorous and highly engaging, Steven has been an outstanding teacher and mentor at both the undergraduate and graduate levels since coming to UB as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2004. RECOGNITIONS Carrie Bramen, Associate Professor, was recently elected Chair of the American Literature section of the MLA for 2015-16, succeeding Michele Elam from Stanford. Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, had his 1972 book Wake Up Dead Man, on the expressive culture of Ramsey State Farm, recently featured in the Oxford American as well as The New Yorker’s section on “Weekend Reading.” PUBLICATIONS Robert Daly, SUNY Distinguished Professor, published two articles and a book chapter: “Navigating Character: Nautical Talk and Virtue Ethics in The Pilot,” James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art. Papers from the 2013 Cooper Conference and Seminar (No. 19); “The United States of America in the Networks of the World: Transatlantic Perspectives in LEAR 6.” The James Fenimore Society Newsletter, 25.2, Whole No. 72 (Fall 2014): 1, 3-8; and “The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry,” Chapter Three of The Cambridge History of American Poetry, 2015: 65-85. Judith Goldman, Assistant Professor of English, published a chapter, “Dysachrony: Temporalities and their discontents, in new and old Romanticisms,” in Active Romanticism: Innovative Poetry and Poetics from the Late Eighteenth-Century to the Present (U of Alabama Press, 2015). Professor Walt Hakala, Assistant Professor, published two essays: “On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 25, no. 2 (2014): 209-27, and “The Authorial Problem in the Khaliq Bari of ‘Khusrau’.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 51, no. 4 (2014): 481-96. Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, has been featured at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in a new exhibition devoted to art about work and workers entitled, Overtime: The Art of Work. Damien Keane, Associate Professor, was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies for his recent book Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication, published by Penn State University Press in 2014. Arabella Lyon, Professor, published an essay, “Recognizing Children When All Recognition is Misrecognition,” in a Special Issue on Children’s Rights. JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics. 34.3-4 (2014): 507-515. Carla Mazzio, Associate Professor, published two essays: “Writing in the Aftermath: Digital Humanities, c. 1600?” in the Journal of the Northern Renaissance (February 2015) and “The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne,” in Vision and its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, February 2015). Steve McCaffery, Professor of English, delivered the keynote address at Scores Poesie Performance Partition, Université Paris Diderot on December 4th. Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor, delivered a keynote address, “Translating the Rhythms of Dickinson’s Poetry,” at “Emily Dickinson Dwells in China: Possibilities of Translation and Transcultural Perspectives,” Fudan University Center for Literary Translation Studies, Shanghai, China, November 22-24, 2014. Nnedi Okorafor, Associate Professor,was a guest speaker at the PEN World Voices Festival, PEN America, New York, NY 2015 (May) and delivered keynote addresses at the International Igbo Conference, University of London, England 2015 (April) and the Alpha Chi Honor Society, Chicago, IL 2015 (March). She also published The Book of the Phoenix (DAW Books, 2015). Alex Reid, Associate Professor, published a book chapter, “Digital Humanities Now and the Possibilities of a Speculative Digital Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 15-20. Randy Schiff, Associate Professor, published two essays: “On Firm Carthaginian Ground: Ethnic Boundary Fluidity and Chaucer’s Dido” in postmedieval 6.1 and “Resisting Surfaces: Description, Distance Reading, and Textual Entanglement” in Exemplaria 26.2-3. David Schmid, Associate Professor, was interviewed by famed true crime writer Harold Schechter and is now online: http://twistedtalesevents.blogspot. com/2015/06/harold-schechter-interviewed-by-david.html Andy Stott, Professor, had a US release of The Poet and the Vampyre (Pegasus, 2014). He was interviewed by Melanie Rehak, Jan. 15th, 2015: http://www. nypl.org/events/programs/2015/01/15/poet-and-vampyre-andrew-stott-and-melanie-rehak Hershini Young, Associated Professor, was a Keynote Speaker at Yoruba Spirituality and Global Acts Conference, UCSB, February 2015.

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In April, Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian delivered the Victor E. Reichert Annual Lecture on Robert Frost sponsored by UB’s Poetry’s Collection. The lecture, “Robert Frost’s ‘Masque of Reason’: Biblical Job in 1945,” discussed a short, satirical play by Frost.

Assistant Professor Dave Alff Awarded NEH Summer Grant Assistant Professor Dave Alff was awarded a prestigious NEH Summer Stipend grant to support the completion of his book manuscript, entitled “The Wreck- age of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660-1730. Professor Alff’s book investigates the idea of projects, concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society in a period defined by revolutions of finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Then, as now, the word ‘project’ meant a proposal for action and the possibility of action itself. By ‘proposal’ Professor Alff means a document drafted to make things happen, while ‘action’ signifies the happening of those things through events like the enclosure of land, the construction of hospitals, and the founding of colonies. “Wreckage of intentions” will offer the first comprehensive critical account of projects, a term as crucial to the making (and unmaking) of eighteenth- century British culture as it is to the functioning (and malfunctioning) of modern society. Professor Alff’s manuscript traces the historical development of an idea that continues to shape possibilities of thought and experience today. The NEH grant allowed Professor Alff to travel to England in August to undertake some final archival research at the British Library, the National Archives in Kew, the Cambridgeshire Records Office, and the River, Drainage and Water Records Special Collection at the University of Nottingham

Goldman, Mardorossian, and Young awarded HI Fellowships Judith Goldman, Carine Mardorossian, and Hershini Young have been awarded Humanities Institute Fellowships for 2015-16. In addition, Goldman has been named OVPRED/HI Fellows because her project especially well represents the interdisciplinary mission of both HI and the Office of the iceV President for Research and Economic Development. • Judith Goldman, Assistant Professor, English • Carine Mardorossian, Professor, English • Hershini Young, Associate Professor, English “______Mt. [blank mount]” “Creolized Ecologies in Caribbean Literature” “The Vulnerability of Horizontality”

Department News New Scholarship for Non-Traditional Women Undergraduates The English Department is pleased to announce the Nielson-Donaldson Women’s Scholarship, which offers financial support for returning or interrupted female students majoring in English or the Liberal Arts at UB. The Nielson-Donaldson Women’s Scholarship is made possible by the generous support of Dr. Sandra Donaldson. Dr. Donaldson established this scholar- ship to honor the unheralded work of women, as exemplified by her mother, Margaret Nielsen Donaldson, and grandmothers, Tekla Gredsted Nielsen and Mary MacMillan Donaldson. Sandra Donaldson received her B.A. in English from UB in 1968, and went on to earn her MA and PhD from the University of Connecticut. She taught for 35 years at the University of North Dakota, where she was the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English, before retiring in 2012. During her time at UND, Professor Donaldson helped to start the Women’s Studies Program and earned both the Outstanding Faculty Award for Development and Service and the UND Foundation / Thomas J. Clifford Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Research. A winner of numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Professor Donaldson is widely known and respected for her scholarship on the Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 2010 she published a 5-volume scholarly edition of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Professor Donaldson created this scholarship to support a non-traditional woman student at UB who is pursuing her education in the humanities. She is especially grateful for the support many years ago from her employer at the time, the New York Telephone Company, which allowed her to attend UB’s Millard Fillmore College during the evenings. Academic success changed Sandra Donaldson’s life and fortunes, and she wishes to pay it forward for a woman student who has financial need and is either employed full-time or supporting a family or both.

Poetry Reading: Robert De Niro, Sr. and Irving Feldman: An Evening with Irving Feldman Painter and Poet at UB in the Late 1960’s THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2015 • 7 PM September 11- October 25, 2015 UB Anderson Gallery • Doors open at 6:30 University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery Irving Feldman, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, taught at the Recruited by his friend Irving Feldman, Robert De Niro, Sr. was one State University of New York at Buffalo from 1964 to 2004, when he retired. of the ‘star’ artists who helped make Buffalo a center for creativity in Feldman’s collection of poetry includes All of Us Here (1986), a finalist for the the arts during the 1960s. 1967 was the first of six summers he taught National Book Critics Circle Award; The Pripet Marshes (1965) and Leaping at UB, which provided the opportunity for him to complete a series of Clear (1976), both finalists for the National Book Award; and Works and paintings that responded dramatically to the light and color of Buffalo’s Days (1961), winner of the Kovner Poetry Prize of the Jewish Book Council. landscapes. Several works in the exhibition are from Buffalo collections, Feldman is the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, as including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and The MacArthur Foundation. His Collected Poems 1954-2004 was published by Schocken Books in 2004. University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY 14214 • ALL EVENTS FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC • www.ubartgalleries.org

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Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture Building on its rich intellectual legacy, this year the Center moves forward with a committed and inventive core group of faculty: Steven Miller (Director, English), Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Executive Director, Comparative Literature), Graham Hammill (English), Fernanda Negrete (Romance Languages), William Solomon (English), and Stephanie Clare (Comparative Literature). Together with the graduate and undergraduate students associated with the Center, we will work on initiatives that both reaffirm the Center’s long and fascinating history at UB and open new directions for the future. In the 2015-16 academic year we will explore two main themes: 1) the complex relationship between psychoanalysis, literature and the visual arts; and 2) the theoretical insights derived from clinical practice. Our other goals include the expansion of the Center’s interdisciplinary collaboration with departments, institutes, and individual faculty members at both UB and other universities in the US and abroad; relaunching the Center’s signature journal publication [formerly umbr(a)]; and organizing a graduate student research colloquium. We are delighted to announce a series of lectures and seminars by scholars whose work brings together the study of psychoanalysis, literature, and art: In October, we welcome Jamieson Webster (psychoanalyst), author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and (with Simon Critchley) Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013), who will offer both a lecture and a seminar. In February, we host Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), an eminent scholar of modernist literature and psychoanalytic theory, author of, most recently, Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction (2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Literature (2014), and The Ghosts of Modernity (2010). And finally, with the Department of Art, we will co-sponsor the visit of Kaja Silverman (University of Pennsylvania), whose most recent books are Flesh of My Flesh (2011) and The Miracle of Analogy: or, the History of Photography, Vol. 1 (2015). - Ewa Plonowska Ziarek - Steven Miller Executive Director, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture Director, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/graduate/psychoanalysis.html Poetics Program The Poetics Program of the English Department will mark its 25th anniversary during 2015-16. This anniversary year features a myriad of events including symposia, exhibits, special guests for the Poetics Plus Series, and two notable events in April, 2016. The Annual Robert Creeley Lecture and Celebration of Poetry will be inaugurated on April 8, 2016. As many of you will recall, Bob Creeley taught at UB from 1966 to 2003 and published over 60 books of poetry as well as numerous books of prose, essays, and interviews. Creeley served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 1989-1991. He is held in the highest regard as a poet and teacher nationally and internationally, and in Buffalo, he is further remembered as an enthusiastic supporter of all arts in the community. The Creeley Lecture and Celebration will begin at 1:00 on Friday April 8th at the Albright-Knox Gallery. After opening remarks, SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian will show their film about Creeley. Remarks by visiting French scholars and transla- tors about Creeley’s importance to the French will be followed by the announcement of the winner and honorable mention for a new poetry contest: the winner of the Young Poet’s Award--open to any student of a Buffalo-area high school--will read his or her winning poem or poems. These events will be followed by the Creeley Lecture, which will address a broad range of concerns involving poetry and poetics, and then by an invitation to anyone in the audience to join in the cel- ebration by reading or reciting a favorite Creeley poem. A reception to celebrate the winning young poet, the Creeley lecturer, and poetry in Buffalo will conclude the afternoon’s events. All events are free and open to the public. If you’d like to send us an anecdote or story about your experience with Creeley to share with others at the celebration (or perhaps on our website), please send it to Karen Serrianne at [email protected]. Further details about this event will be forthcoming on our website. It is co-sponsored by riverrun and by Just Buffalo Literary Center. Our second April event, an academic conference, “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years,” to be held April 9th-10th, 2016, will provide an occasion for intensive reflec- tion on the possibilities and agencies that poetics brings to bear on trajectories of the now and histories-to-be. The conference will consist primarily of discus- sion: papers will be short (10-12 minutes); there will be no plenary speakers and no introductions. Seminar workshops will enable intensive conversation on particular topics in small groups. Panel presentations will propose material and ideas for continuing discussion with all participants. For more information about the conference and to receive a “Call for Papers,” please contact Allison Cardon at [email protected]. - Myung Mi Kim Director, Poetics Program http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/graduate/poetics.html Alumni/ae Reunion Spring 2016 Once again, we are inviting UB English graduate and undergraduate alums to join us on campus for a chance to reconnect with old friends, visit with former professors and explore recent developments on campus and in the city of Buffalo. Those of you who attended our last reunion a few years back know how much fun this will be! This year, the event will overlap and intersect with the April 8 first Annual Robert Creeley Memorial Lecture and Celebration of Poetry on Friday afternoon at the Albright-Knox Gallery, concluding with an invitation to anyone present to read their favorite Creeley poem, a reception, and then a “flash” reading for anyone who would like to participate later that evening.The reunion will also overlap with the Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years Conference on contemporary innovative poetry on April 9-10. Returning alums are invited to attend part or all of both events. The reunion proper will involve workshops and “back to class” sessions on Saturday with popular English professors such as Bob Daly and Barbara Bono, as well as panels made up of alumni, current English majors, and Journalism Director Jody Biehl and current Spectrum editors. We’ll be offering tours of some of the new buildings and areas on campus, followed by a reception and an exhibit of materials from the 25-year history of the Poetics Program in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries. (NB: Anyone interested in donating chapbooks, magazines, photographs, faculty syllabi, audio/video recordings, reading posters, and other ephemera from the history of the Poetics Program should please get in touch with James Maynard, Associate Curator, at [email protected].) Saturday evening, alums can enjoy visiting any of Buffalo’s excellent new or old restaurants or join Poetics Conference attendees at a buffet reception and poetry reading at the Karpeles Manu- script Library on Porter Avenue. If you are able to come early, you may also want to join us for the Buffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare events featuring talks by Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass on April 6 & 7. Registration for the reunion is free (however, there is a fee for the Poetics Conference). Please mark your calendars for this weekend and join us for intellectual stimulation, reminiscing, eating and socializing. Check our website and your mailboxes for forthcoming details about all of these April events.

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 6 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Graduation Ceremony May 2015

by Judith Goldman, of course, helped to make you outstanding critical refuse, that we need to unmake every day. Assistant Professor thinkers, insightful readers, articulate speakers, I’m not one to speak in imperatives, but the com- as well as cogent, exciting writers – of literary and mencement speech is a genre that encourages the The kinds of reading cultural criticism and of journalism and poetry and imperative mood. So, as I close, I will take it up on and attention you have fiction. its conventions. cultivated in earning your It has also honed your intellectual curiosity, English degree – up close Don’t be excel- trained your historical empathy and your sense of lent. and at a distance – with differing histories from “above” and “below.” It has full concentration and Don’t be part of a made you aware that there is no one monolithic myopic celebration through distraction or English, but Englishes in flux across time and diffusion – along linear culture that adu- space, changing in response to different dynamics lates “innovation,” and non-linear itineraries and pressures, while you have also learned how -- of literary texts and texts from other domains that only looks all of these Englishes have provided rich resources towards a streamlined, high-tech and disciplines – as well as of many other kinds of to makers of literature and culture. Through earn- media and performance; the capacity for subtle, future. Take a critical stance towards problem- ing your degree, solving, sit with a problem. sharp critical thought you have developed you have through these reading practices as you have Engage in speculative, holistic thought about the fostered a short- and long-term consequences of losing what reflected on how meaning and experience capacity to are made -- these are skills of resistance to is being engineered away. sense ab- Read and research deeply, so that underlying “market thinking” that I hope you will continue sences and to value and foster throughout your lives. structural issues become visible. lacunae, Respect differences. To speak for a moment to the concerns of an aptitude Create solutions that don’t put efficiency, expedi- some parents out there (and these concerns absolutely ence, standardization, or the “majority” first. are reasonable and caring), what the abilities essential to nurtured in English, and in the humanities understanding how power can work in society Don’t let your imagination and your desire for in general, add to the economy tends to be to silence and repress and exclude. You have what literature and culture and society can be, be undercounted; and these abilities, while market- gained cross-cultural knowledge, sensitivity, and molded by austerity thinking. able in themselves, are also foundational to many respect. You have become generous listeners and Always remember the capaciousness and lar- different kinds of jobs and professions interlocutors. gesse of your imagination, against stingy austerity. But I also want to suggest that what you have And I want to assert this as a strength. All of Be the positivity. built here, everything you have accomplished and these amazing resources you carry with you now But more importantly, also be the interesting, that you have cultivated in yourself as a person, are not easily quantifiable. They are not easily or thoughtful negativity. can go towards building another kind of culture comfortably harnessed to profit-making or acceler- Everything in this culture wants to speed things than the one dominant here and now. A culture ated production. They are not easily instrumental- up, to force obsolescence, to force disposability. that is not so consumer-oriented or profit-minded ized. Think it through for yourself; do it the long way. Be slow if you need to be. or entrepreneurial. One that recognizes and It is not a stretch to say that the strengths makes central forms of value beyond or against a Be the slowdown. you’ve built here through the study of language, Be the holdout. narrow dollar value -- attuned to the demands of literature, and culture can help shape a society civilization as opposed to those of economy. Be the wrench in the works, if there needs to be based on care, collaboration, collective- one. The demanding course of study through mindedness. An inclusive which you have earned society that works against And one last thing: your indifference, competitive- Do with your life what is truly fulfilling to you, as English ness, distrust, fear, hard part of a larger community. degree in and soft hatreds and their [The full version of this speech can be found on our “liberal various forms of violence, the English Department website] arts corner” which we sometimes forget of this large are learned ways of being university, has, in the world that we can

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 7 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Undergraduate Student News

SUNY Chancellors Award for Student Excellence - Two English majors were awarded the SUNY Chancellors Awards for Student Excellence, John 2015 Writing Award Winners O’Brien and Chelsea Reinhardt. The SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student The Arthur Axlerod Memorial Award: Sarah Grimaldi and Edward Span- Excellence recognizes students who have best demonstrated and been rec- genthal. Honorable Mentions: Angelina Bruno, Alex Hunt, Corey Klino, ognized for their integration of academic excellence with other aspects of their Cassandra Norris, and Cathryn Piersa. lives, which may include leadership, campus involvement, athletics, career The Scribbler’s Prize: Amanda Kelley. Honorable Mention: Cathryn Piersa achievement, community service or creative and performing arts. The English Department Essay Contest: Alex Hunt. Honorable Mention: Chelsea Reinhardt recently graduated summa cum laude with a double Edward Spangenthal. major in English and Health and Human Services, and minors in Education, Counseling, and Sociology. During her time at UB, she worked as a student The Joyce Carol Oates Prize: Emily Anderson. Honorable mentions: Monica manager for the University Libraries and tutored students in English for the Lippens, and Veronica Wendy Educational Opportunity Program’s Academic Resource Center. She also The George Knight Houpt Prize: Alex Hunt completed internships in the Buffalo Public Schools and the Kensington and The Albert Cook Prize, The Mac Hammond Prize, and the John Logan Prize: Chelsea Youth Offending Team in London, England. She was a member of Emily Anderson, Satya S. Gundu, and Amanda McLaughlin. Honorable Men- Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Tau Delta, the UB relay for life planning committee, tions: Conor Patrick Clarke, Kristina Marie Darling, and Alex Hunt. and UB running club; further, she participated in the global scholars program The Creative Non-Fiction Prize: Rebecca Tong. First runner-up: Angelina through the academies and actively volunteered as a global ambassador for Bruno. the study abroad programs office. In Chelsea’s free time as an undergraduate, she trained for and ran three marathons, spanning three countries. This past Journalism Awards summer, she began a Graduate Assistantship in the Study Abroad Programs Office at UB, and will be pursuing a master’s degree in Higher Education Lisa Khoury, Sara Dinatale, and Emma Janicki were honored this April at Administration at UB in the fall. Her ultimate goal is to earn a law degree and the Region 1 Spring Conference at Hofstra University. The following stories work in Educational Law. were recognized for journalistic excellence: John O’Brien graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English and Lisa Khoury for “Animal Heights” Urban and Public Policy Studies. In addition to winning the SUNY Chancellor’s Sara DiNatale for “Law School Dean Makau Mutua Resigns” Award, he was selected as the 2015 Outstanding Senior in both English Emma Janicki for “Publishing Textbooks can Mean Big Money for Profes- and Social Sciences Interdisciplinary. John is both a UB Honors College sors” scholar and an English department honors student who has won numerous honors, including the 2015 English Department George Knight Houpt Prize, UB’s student journalists garnered numerous awards at the Fall 2014 meeting Dean’s List, an Honors College Scholarship for International Study, Dash’s of the College Media Association. The Associated Collegiate Press Awards Market Academic Scholarship, membership in the Mortarboard chapter, CAS’s went to Lisa Khoury (fourth place) for news story of the year for her piece Lester Milbrath Award, and Phi Beta Kappa membership. Deeply interested in on unrecognized fraternities at UB; to Brian Keschinger (second place) civic engagement, John has been involved with urban revitalization projects for sports section design of the year for a cover story on Khalil Mack; and such as Habitat for Humanity. He has served as an intern for US Represen- to Chad Cooper (honorable mention) for spot news. The Pinnacle Awards tative Brian Higgins and US Senator Charles Schumer. He has also taught given by the College Media Association went to Aaron Mansfield (first English at the Islamic Cultural Center in Valencia, Spain, and served as a tutor place) for sports column writing and Brian Keschinger (5th place) for design and mentor for UB athletes. of the year for his cover story on Khalil Mack.

Phi Beta Kappa (FBK) inductees: Nicolle Barsch Audrey Foppes Career Fair 2015 Angelina Frances Bruno Alexandra Steele Mary Hunt Jasmine Elise Chang Sarah Elizabeth Mcgrath Melissa Chen Nora Mcguire Max Frederick Crinnin John O’Brien Anna Elizabeth Davidson Chelsea Catherine Reinhardt

List of Sigma Tau Delta (STD) inductees: Brittany Hill Taloria Gamble Rebecca Sabia Jasmine Chang Alaina Taber Kyli Foster Tomas Olivier

Featured Undergraduate Student - Sara DiNatale For four years at UB, I crowded over computer keyboards and reporters’ notebooks, often working late at night – really early into the morning – to file stories for The Spectrum. I learned how to be a journalist by being a journalist, surrounded by great people who helped teach me the craft. No number of journalism classes can compare to the on-the-field experience a college newspaper offers. But the classes help, too, and without the journalism certificate program I would have never built up relationships with the working reporters who helped guide me to where I am now: just finishing up a highly sought-after and rigorous internship at The Boston Globe. While at UB, I was able to navigate complicated issues for The Spectrum. I felt the pressures of deadlines, understood what it was like to work on a team, and learned how to handle stories with care. In my English classes, I was able to devour beautiful writing, always working to enhance my own. The majority of interns at The Globe with me this summer attended journalism and Ivy League schools. But my time at UB and The Spectrum left me just as prepared to pursue a career in journalism. I’m so excited to see what’s next.

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 8 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Undergraduate Student News

NAME Launch 2015:15 Year Anniversary

Jessica Smith, NAME Founding Editor On the 151h Anniversary of NAME Magazine

It must have been a Monday, because Robert Creeley’s office hours were always on Monday mornings. I remember that hallway on the 3rd floor of Clemens and his office, the last one on the window side near the elevators, the door always open, the room usually packed with boisterous boys. But this day I was alone with him. I told him I wanted to start a literary magazine, not like Generation, which was more fiction- and art­-focused, but a poetry-centered magazine housed in the English Department and associated with the Poetics Program. Bob occupied the David Gray Chair, and he, like Charles Bernstein who followed him in that position, used his endowment to fund graduate student read- ing series and publications. But there was a group of undergraduates who had embraced the Poetics Program. We’d met in Charles Bernstein’s or Creeley’s or Susan Howe’s classes, bonded over heated arguments about what “real” poetry was and whether Charles Bukowski was worth reading, and begun to gel as a group. We needed our own publication. It must have been January; he probably laughed gently and wiped his eye, a gesture that often punctuated his conversation. He was probably wearing flannel. He told me that usually all of his Chair money was taken, but that Jorie Graham had just cancelled her “Wednesdays at Four” engagement because she had a cold. So he could give me $300. I remember how staggering that sum seemed at the time, although in the next few years our budget was to grow by 500%. We filled out all the paperwork to start a new club. We solicited submissions from everyone we knew. The first issue was printed out on my home printer-$300 paid for paper, ink, translu- cent plastic envelopes, and the venue and refreshments for the first reading/release party. Most of us who started and worked on name in those first few years are still friends fifteen years later, although we live different lifestyles all over the coun- try (indeed, all over the world) now. Those late nights printing out name on the Cybrary printers before they were regulated, tearing up cardboard or spray- painting bubble wrap, arguing about the inclusion or exclusion of a poem, celebrating our work at the end of the semester with packed poetry readings at Rust Belt Books, gave form to our experiences as undergraduates, artists, and humans. I celebrate and congratulate Featured the work of the editors then and since who have made meaningful An Elegiac Ode community available to young writers at UB. Poem “Reprinted with permission from Jessica Smith and NAME from their Should I pride myself on an achievement? 15th anniversary issue” Or on the idea of one? For time hath come to let go, To let go of that which I sedulously worked for.

Should not I celebrate my feat? Before mourning at its sacrificial altar? For the time I treat with contempt has come to rid me, unceremoniously, of all industry I worked with.

Is it not my time to rejoice? Before I grudgingly espouse Abject dejection with resignation? Maybe not, For the contumelies of reality threateningly dragooned me into it.

Is it a greater feat to orchestrate my victory with oblational notes or should I do myself a favor and take my fruits of labor?

Perhaps it is time for this bitter savor, To let perish my fruits of labor And to stifle the consequential quaver.

It is time to let go, For there is a time to cry also. Farewell, thee victory While lackaday bears a beacon fit for me.

by Satya S. Gundu

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 9 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Graduate Student News

CAS Dissertation Completion Fellowships Daniel Gomes: “Cold Island: Ballads, Media, and the Irish Left, 1922-72” Marion Quirici: “Fitness for Freedom: Disability and Irish Modernism” Robert and Carol Morris Dissertation Completion Fellowships Shosuke Kinugawa: “Mark Twain’s Secret Writings” Melissa Schindler: “Black Women Writers and the Spatial Limits of the African Diaspora” Louis and Joan Slovinsky Dissertation Completion Fellowships Macy Todd: “Countable Man: From the Great Famine to Modernism” Gender Institute Dissertation Fellowships Kristina Marie Darling: “‘An Imagist Turned Philosopher’: Formal Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry”

Awards Marion Quirici has been awarded a dissertation Shayani Bhattacharya and Shosuke Kinugawa are recipients of the fellowship from the American Association of University Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award for 2014-15. This award is Women for the 2015-16 academic year. Quirici’s project, a highly competitive honor given to the very best graduate student teachers “Fitness for Freedom: Disability and Irish Modernism,” at UB. examines the responses of twentieth-century Irish writers Patricia Chaudron was accepted into an NEH summer institute on Paul to national stereotypes of disability and degeneracy. Con- Laurence Dunbar, co-organized by Tom Morgan, a graduate of our PhD fronting a postcolonial heritage of stereotypes feminizing program, who is now an Associate Professor of English at the University of the Irish as weak and dependent, or masculinizing them Dayton. as unruly simians, Irish writers in the twentieth century Alison Fraser was accepted into an NEH summer institute on Early Ameri- were uniquely situated to challenge intersectional prejudices of race, gender, can Women’s Archives. and disability. The dissertation argues that modernist Irish literature centers disabled perspectives to resist the notion of fitness as a basis for autonomy, Lara Hubel, Clare Brown, Daniel Schweitzer, and Min Young Kim were whether national self-rule, individual citizenship, or creative agency. Modernists awarded travel fellowships from the Humanities Institute to attend the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College in June. like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien, and Christy Brown give voice to disabled and debilitated storytellers and writers in their narratives to show Jesse Miller, PhD candidate in English, was awarded a Public Humanities that disability is a natural component of the human experience regardless of Fellowship by UB’s Humanities Institute for his project, “Reading for Better race or nation. Ultimately, the project asserts disability as a basis for inclusion Health(Care): A Bibliotherapy Workshop and Educational E-pamphlet.” in, rather than exclusion from, civil society. Marion Quirici has been awarded the Krause Research Fellowship in At UB, Marion is the president of the Modernisms Graduate Group, and the Irish Studies. It is a $700 travel grant to be used for archival research. graduate assistant of the International Yeats Society, which takes Buffalo as its Marion plans to go to the National Library of Ireland to consult the newly North American headquarters. She also co-hosts a biweekly Finnegans Wake acquired Christy Brown papers for the final chapter of her dissertation. She reading group, and takes an active role in the Center for Disability Studies and has been chosen to receive a Certificate of Honorable Mention through this year’s Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award. the Gender Institute. Macy Todd and Hannah Fogarty have been awarded the Dickens Project Annual Fellowship. This is a week-long summer seminar on the Santa Cruz campus that brings together faculty, graduate students, and members of the general public for formal lectures by distinguished scholars, seminars, Three Students Awarded Opler-Doubrava small discussion groups, films, performances, and a variety of informal social activities. Fellowships for 2015-16 Andrew Dorkin, for his dissertation project “’The Mind Sneezing’: Placement News Humor, Media Theory, and Modernist Poetry” Joseph Aldinger (PhD 2015): Lecturer, Randolph College Jesse Miller, for his dissertation project “The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Maria Almanza (PhD 2014): Visiting Assistant Professor, Randolph College Bibliotherapy, Disability, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1914-1945” Kyungin Bae (PhD 2014): Lecturer, Korean University, Seoul Leslie Nickerson,for her dissertation project “Clothing, Tactility, and Prentiss Clark (PhD 2014): Assistant Professor, University of South Dakota Embodiment in Eighteenth-Century Literature” Jeremiah Croster (PhD 2015): Assistant Professor, Houston Community Opler-Doubrava fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to College PhD candidates in the English Department entering their fifth year who Stephanie Farrar (PhD 2013): Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin- continue to hold a TAship. The Marilyn Doubrava Endowment was es- Eau Claire tablished by Sterling M. and Kathryn L. Doubrava as a memorial to their David Hadbawnik (PhD 2015): Assistant Professor, American University, daughter. The Opler Scholarship Fund is generously supported by Morris Kuwait E. Opler and Lucille R. Opler. Jung Min Kim (PhD 2015): Lecturer, University of Seoul Jason Marley (PhD 2013): Assistant Professor, English, Francis Marion University Justin Park (PhD 2015): Lecturer, University in Turku Courtney Pfahl (PhD 2014): Staff Writer, Office of the Provost, UB Emily Anderson has an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Little:Novels, Siobhan Scarry (PhD 2013): reappointed Visiting Assistant Professor & appearing in the January issue of Harper’s. http://harpers.org/author/ Chair of Dept. at Bethel College emilyanderson David Squires (PhD 2015) received a two-year Visiting Professorship at Washington State University in Pullman, WA

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 10 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu HI Graduate Fellow Investigates Healthcare Reading for Better Health(Care) In discussions about healthcare in the 21st century two topics loom large: technical innovations and economic repercussions. In this, Buffalo is no exception, especially as the city prepares to situate itself as an important medical hub in New York State with the opening of the University at Buffalo’s new downtown medi- cal campus. By contrast, what tends to receive much less attention in popular discourse regarding healthcare in Buffalo and in the country at large is the experi- ence of patients. What is it like to be a patient today? How do cultural narratives and economic forces shape experiences of illness and disability? What is the phenomenology of struggling to navigate the bureaucratic protocols of health insurance? Of the encounter with modern technologies of visualization, diagnosis, and cure? What might the more empathetic and equitable paths to wellbeing that the present moment calls for look like? With support from the University at Buffalo’s Humanities Institute and the New York Council for the Humanities, I’ve begun to design and implement a public project called “Reading for Better Health(Care)” which aims to interrogate these important, but too often overlooked questions. It does so by bringing the practices of literary studies – of reading, writing, analysis, and discussion – out of the academy and into spaces usually reserved for the biomedical. Through a series of workshops held at area hospitals, patients are encouraged to read and analyze stories about illness, to share their own experiences of the medical institution, and, in light of these discussions, to conduct utopian re-imaginings of the hospital in which they are temporarily embedded. In exploring the role that reading and writing might play in experiences of illness, this intervention puts into practice my dissertation research on the history of bibliotherapy, the intentional use of literature as a tool for achieving and maintaining mental health and general wellbeing. It also draws inspiration from recent trends in the medical humanities focused on the narrative aspects of medicine and on the importance of centering the stories of patients in medical practice. But where bibliotherapy aims at direct medical efficacy and the medical humanities focuses on the education of doctors and other healthcare providers, “Reading for Better Health(Care)” aims to provide a space for patients to co-create new knowledge by voicing their own experiences of illness and reflecting upon the ways healthcare institutions can best serve them, not just as bodies, but also as people. Jesse Miller is a PhD Candidate in the English Department and a reviews editor for the literary culture and criticism website Full Stop (www.full-stop.net). His dissertation project is called The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Bibliotherapy, Disability, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1914-1945. Featured Alumnus (BA 1979) the work of the biologist Lewis Thomas (Lives of a Cell), or Dennis Flanagan Garrett R. Sanders (Flanagan’s Version). These are examples of literary expositions on the beauty Garry Sanders is a leadership coach and research administra- and potential of science. Flanagan was a former editor of Scientific American, tive professional. He is currently the Executive Vice President and to my knowledge, did not major in science in college. Both Flanagan and and Chief Operating Officer of the Research Foundation for the Thomas had an ability to describe science for laymen, to ask questions, to SUNY system and is an active member of the National Council speak in metaphors, and to construct a compelling story. The latter skills I recall of University Research Administrators. Garry has led teams at a learning as an English major. variety of colleges, universities, research institutes, and hospitals, The humanities have always, and will always, serve as an equal companion including the University at Albany, the University of Rochester Medical Center, to the sciences. Society needs both, of course. We need our stories, contexts, and the NIH. He was a double major in English and History at UB. myths, and ability to confront science (see John Hersey, Hiroshima). I have Earlier this summer, Graham Hammill sat down with Garry to talk about his found both English and History to be the links to making sense of the world, and experiences at UB and how being an English major has influenced his career. especially post-9/11, as the writings of Don DeLillo and Karen Armstrong have GH: What do you most remember about the English classes you took done for many of us. when you were an undergraduate at UB? GH: What career advice would you give to English majors today? GS: I recall that in contrast to many courses I took at UB, I could depend on GS: I hope that English majors---like all college students---have learned to write my English classes to be conducted in smaller group settings suitable for well, even if their writing techniques or styles need to be acculturated to their discussion. I remember class discussions to be lively, as we students were workplaces. experimenting with our perspectives on world literature and the challenges of But this is not the best advice I would give. The best advice I would give expressing our opinions, and being challenged about those opinions. English majors today is to understand that your greatest skill is in understanding I also remember one semester where I took a history class on the American context, realizing that every organization you work with, and for, is in the midst Civil War while taking an English course on American transcendentalism. I of some story. The story is made of characters. Some see themselves as he- enjoyed learning about this period of our country’s life through the lenses of roes, most do not see themselves as anti-heroes but their dysfunction can bring literature and history simultaneously. Great way to learn! down an organization. Understand your employers and ‘stakeholders’ voices GH: Did you have a favorite class? and motivations and needs. Understand that character development is not just GS: I took a survey English class during my freshman year (can’t recall profes- something that occurs in novels. sor’s name) and our professor gave us a writing assignment: defend something Speaking of novels, in organizational life you don’t always know if you are in writing that you find personally abhorrent. It was a test of rhetorical skills. I in chapter one or two of a thirty chapter book, or perhaps you are in chapter had a lot of fun with that assignment, and remember writing an argument against twenty-nine. But, as an English major, you know to think this way and to ask the the seafaring code of conduct about “help women and children first” should a questions you need to ask to understand the story. boat sink or be in peril of sinking. My challenge was to argue that everyone People talk in organizations about understanding the “story” and “backstory,” should fend for themselves! This was a great lesson about the power of words meaning that there are multiple perspectives and experiences to consider in and the morality of argument-making. I have occasionally thought of this as- making decisions or understanding actions and behaviors. Be brave to ask the signment when participating in policy making discussions, especially in research questions that you know you need to ask to understand the story. compliance and ethics matters. What is right? How do we know it is right? Who If you don’t understand your organization’s story, you can’t lead it. I experi- says so? What is their stake in the matter? ence this daily in my work as a leadership coach working with clients, and in my GH: How did your double major in English and History influence your current leadership role at the Research Foundation for SUNY. career choices? GH: Do you have a favorite author, book, or type of literature you enjoy GS: I am a practicing leadership coach, having received certification from reading? Georgetown University, and I use the concepts of story and metaphor with my GS: I found Lauren Hillenbrand’s book, Unbroken, to be absolutely wonderful. It coaching clients. These concepts come from the humanities. I think it was my was a story of courage worth telling, and the period of history (World War II era) earlier experience learning about people and places that led me to leadership has always been fascinating to me. Also, I would recommend The Adventures coaching as my “encore career.” of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. In all candor, this was a book I was assigned GH: You’ve spent your career promoting and advocating for advanced at UB, but never finished while a student. Several years later, when I was in my research. What role or roles does advanced research play in the world early 30’s (same age as Bellow when he wrote the book), I picked it up again today? Do you see a special role for the humanities? and read it and found the American story of Augie, his life growing up during the GS: My “first” career has been spent serving researchers and serving the Great Depression, to be very powerful and reminiscent of stories I remember institutions that employ researchers: colleges, universities, research institutes, hearing from my own parents and grandparents. and agencies that support and conduct research. It has been an honor to work GH: Is there anything else you’d like to share? in the field of research administration. I enjoy reading about science, especially GS: Thanks for this opportunity. Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 11 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Alumni/ae News

Anna Badalian (PhD, 2013) is now working in Manhattan as an attorney at a two new full-length volumes of poetry annually, awarding publication and hono- mid-sized full-service law firm. raria to the best manuscripts submitted in an international competition. The Anselm Berrigan (BA, 1993) has recently published Pregrets, a small book of book is available from Fordham University Press, as well as Amazon, Powell’s poems through Australia’s Vagabond Press. He has a book-length poem titled and other retailers. Primitive State forthcoming this summer from Edge Books, and a book-length Prentiss Clark (PhD, 2014) accepted a tenure-track position (American Litera- series of rectangle-shaped poems titled Come In Alone due out from Wave ture) in the Department of English at the University of South Dakota. An article Books in the spring of 2016. He read this summer in the Discutia Secreta liter- titled “’Pulse for Pulse in Harmony with the Universal Whole’: Hearing ‘Self- ary festival in Arad, Romania, and will be a participant in the Lower Manhattan Reliance’ Anew,” was published in Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.3 (Winter Cultural Council’s Process Space residency program in NYC this autumn. He 2014): 319-341. [email protected] lives with his family in New York City, teaches part time for Brooklyn College Jill Colella (BA, 1997) launched Ingredient, a food magazine for children in and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and is the current poetry edi- 2010; Jill is happy to announce Butternut, a magazine for very young readers tor of The Brooklyn Rail, a print & on-line arts and culture monthly. ages 3-6 that emphasizes food and reading literacy. The inaugural issue will Sanjay Bhatt (BA, 2009) went to dental school and graduated in 2015 with a arrive in mailboxes in late August. Subscribe or learn more at www.butternut- DDS degree. He is now doing a residency in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at mag.com. University of Texas Southwestern; the residency is 4 to 6 years after obtain- Eric Cortellessa (BA, 2014) is now taking an MA in journalism at the Me- ing a doctorate. The profession involves facial reconstruction, micro vascular dill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago. In October, surgery, facial plastic surgery, head and neck cancer, trauma, anesthesiology, he was selected as a fellow with the Social Justice News Nexus. The current dental implants, and wisdom teeth extractions. class--an array of graduate students and professional journalists--are working Alan Bigelow (PhD, 1992) continues to publish his electronic fiction and po- on a series of reporting projects dealing with mental health care issues in Chi- etry at http://www.webyarns.com. These stories and poems use images, text, cago. He was selected to go on a trip to Pakistan during spring break. audio, video, and other components. They are non-traditional narratives that employ poetic and occasionally humorous and ironic metaphors. Often they Julianna Crumlish (BA, 2011) decided to go back to school and will be gradu- make statements about contemporary life, culture, and politics. These stories ating with a degree in Environmental Science this December. She has a re- and poems are created for the web, although they also appear in museums, search fellowship this summer where she will be studying water quality and festivals, and galleries as media installations. beach closures. David J. Bookbinder (BA, 1973) has signed with the literary agent Stephany Jack D’Amico (PhD, 1965) published “The Dangers and Virtues of Theatrical- Evans, president of Fine Print Literary Management. Ms. Evans is representing ity in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 130, Jan. 2015, his recently completed book Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas, a collection of images 42-62. [email protected] and essays that distill into one volume his work as artist and healer. david@ Michael Davidson (PhD, 1972) is retiring at the end of this academic year from davidbookbinder.com the Literature Department of the University of California, San Diego where he Patti Brocato (BA, 1989) is a receptionist at the Univ. at Buffalo Child Care has taught for the past forty years. Recent publications include: On the Out- Center. She is proud to be part of the university community. She has been here skirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2011); since the ‘70’s, and still is dedicated to her profession. She works with children Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013); “The and their families every day, whether it’s just saying, “Hi”, or attending an event Rage of Caliban: Disabling Bodies in Modernist Aesthetics.” Modernism/mo- in the classroom when the children are performing a skit, or playing at the water dernity 22.4 (Nov. 2015 forthcoming) “Missing Bodies: Disappearances in the table. Education, teaching and learning, go hand in hand. Aesthetic” (Winter, 2016 forthcoming) [email protected] Clark Davis (PhD, 1992) has a book just out from the University of Texas Alec Brownie (MA, 2012; BA, 2009) had his essay titled “Life and Thoughts Press. It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing is the first of an Aspie” published in the winter 2015 issue of At Buffalo http://issuu.com/ biography of an under-appreciated American writer, author of The House of ubaa/docs/at_buffalo_winter_2015_issuu/0 Breath. Barbara Cantalupo (nee White) (PhD, 1988) was promoted to Professor of Sally Ann Drucker (PhD, 1988) Performed at an Oklahoma Chautauqua as English in the College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University, July 2015. She re- Dust Bowl Survivor Hazel Shaw this past June. When not presenting figures cently published Poe and the Visual Arts (Penn State University Press, 2014). from history in public Humanities events, she’s a Professor in the Dept. of Eng- http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06309-6.html lish at SUNY-Nassau. [email protected] Michael Castro (BA, 1967) earned a PhD in American literature at Washington University (his dissertation, Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth Century Poets Kristin Dykstra (MA, 1988; PhD, 2002) started at Illinois State as an assistant and the Native American was published by University of New Mexico Press, professor in the English Department in 2002, leaving as a full professor in 2014 and later as a University of Oklahoma Press paperback); taught at the Univer- to accept a position as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. She has been translating contemporary Cuban literature sity of Missouri-St. Louis and Lindenwood University; co-founded the literary since the mid-1990s. Her recent publication news also overlaps with President organization & magazine River Styx in 1975 (it’s still going); edited the maga- Obama’s recent announcement on US/Cuban relations. The University of Ala- zine of the same name, directed its reading series, and hosted three literary bama Press released the first of her three books of translated literature (with radio programs that ran for a total of twenty years. He recently has been named introductions) in December 2014: Other Letters to Milena, by Reina María Ro- the first Poet Laureate of St. Louis. dríguez. She will have two more bilingual editions forthcoming from Alabama Matthew Chambers (PhD, 2011) is now Assistant Professor at the University in 2015, by poets Juan Carlos Flores and Ángel Escobar. As for other work of Lodz in Poland. He recently published Modernism, Periodicals, and Culture now in progress, she and Marcelo Morales Cintero have just received the good Poetics http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/modernism,-periodicals,-and- news that their selection from his newest manuscript, “El mundo como ser / cultural-poetics-matthew-chambers/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137541352 The World as Presence,” was chosen by judge Jen Hofer to receive the Gulf Ranjan Chhibber (PhD, 1999) is currently a Professor of Film Studies and Coast Prize in Literary Translation. Humanities at Florida State College at Jacksonville. He gave a recent interview Jonathan Feldman (BS, 1990) was one of two international keynote speakers published by an Indian think tank called the Society for Policy Studies, that at the New Zealand CIO Summit in June, speaking about his third “IT turn- runs a news site called “The Indian Diaspora.” They are comprised of current around”: making IT more effective by making it more human focused. http:// and ex-Members of Parliament in India, ex-Ambassadors, etc. In the interview www.ciosummit.co.nz/cio-summit/speakers-2015 http://feldman.org/ he thanks his UB professors by name for making him the person he is today: Erwin H Ford II (PhD, 1988) transferred his personal research archive to the Dr. Alan Spiegel, Dr. Howard Wolf, both of the English Department, and Dr. Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, for: The Erwin H. Ford Brian Henderson of Media Study (his Ph.D. was focused on Media Studies/ II Collection of George V. Higgins. University of South Carolina Library Special Film Studies within English). To see this interview: http://bit.ly/RanjanHorror- Collection: The Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collection, provid- Interview ing national and international scholars, faculty, and students an opportunity Terrence Chiusano (MA, 2000) has a new book out, On Generation & Corrup- to discover a wealth of materials that capture Higgins’ world and his singular tion: Poems, winner of the 2013-14 POL (Poetry Out Loud) Editor’s Prize. The impact on the development of the American literary canon. POL Book Series, run in coordination with Fordham University Press, issues

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Graham Foust (PhD, 2002) is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in Writing of Gertrude Stein, Lexington Books, a collection of critical essays. Neil English at the University of Denver. His sixth book of poems, Time Down to Schmitz’s essay, “Tender Buttons, notwithstanding,” is in the collection. Sha- Mind, will be published by Flood Editions in December of 2015. In October of ron’s Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric, University of Alabama 2015, Wave Books will publish Of Entirety Say the Sentence, a co-translation- Press, is also just out. -with Samuel Frederick of the Pennsylvania State University—of the late Ger- David Koepsell (BA, 1990) has been a tenured Associate Professor of Phi- man poet Ernst Meister’s Sage vom Ganzen den Satz. losophy at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy, Mary Galbraith (PhD, 1989) has been teaching at San Diego State Univer- and Management in the Netherlands, Visiting Professor at UNAM, Instituto sity in the English Department since 1996. She teaches courses in children’s de Filosoficas, Mexico, and Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives at literature, adolescent literature, Victorian novels, psychological novels, and ad- Comisión Nacional De Bioética in Mexico. He is married with two children, vanced composition. This fall she went on sabbatical to England, where she is Amelia (4 years old) and Alexandro, 2 months. He and his family live in Mexico pursuing some theoretical work that will also be an appreciation of Raymond City. He writes and teaches about science, ethics, and technology, and dabbles Briggs, a British artist who creates picture books and graphic memoirs using in writing sic-fi. comic strip format. Her education at UB has given her a wonderful founda- Carolyn Kyler (PhD, 1989) and Jocelyn Sheppard (MLS, 1989; PhD, 1990) tion for theorizing as well as close reading. During her graduate school years, were married in Washington, DC, in October 2013. Carolyn is Professor of she took seminars in six different departments (English, Philosophy, Computer English and Director of the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at Washington Science, Psychology, Communicative Disorders, Linguistics) and served as & Jefferson College. She currently serves on the board of the College English graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. Association. Jocelyn is a consultant (www.redhouseconsulting.com) providing Andrew L. Giarelli (PhD, 1984) left Buffalo in 1980, all but his dissertation research and strategic support to startups, nonprofits and other innovative or- completed, and moved to New York City, where he pursued a freelance journal- ganizations. She recently served as President of the Association of Indepen- ism career while spending summers on Montana’s Northern Cheyenne Indian dent Information Professionals. Reservation doing fieldwork for that dissertation, directed by Bruce Jackson. From 1984-1988 he taught feature and magazine writing in the journalism de- Chris Leise (PhD, 2007) published one essay in January: “The Eye-Ball and partment at New York University; from 1988-92 he did likewise at Utah State the Butterfly: Beauty and the Individual Soul in Emerson and Hawthorne,” University. In 1993 he was a senior Fulbright lecturer in journalism at the Uni- Philological Quarterly 92.4 (Fall 2013 [backdated]), 471-497, and another in versity of Malta. Upon return to Utah he quit his position and founded Edg- March: “‘With Names, No Coincidence’: Colson Whitehead’s Postracial Puritan ing West, a regional Western magazine that lasted until 1998. He moved to Allegory,” African American Review 47.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 285-300. Portland, Ore., where he became an assistant professor of English at Portland Dave Lucia (BA, 1970) was at UB during a very exciting time. There were State University and helped found the department’s graduate writing program many luminaries in the English department, such as John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, and taught courses in Twain and folklore. In 2011 he won a second Fulbright, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jonathan Coetzee, and Carl Dennis. He got to take this time to teach American studies at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slo- classes under the last three, and they also happened to be excellent instruc- vak Republic. Since 2012 he has taught folklore, popular culture and journalism tors. As a result, he has had a lifelong love of literature and even once wrote a courses each spring semester at Anglo-American University, Prague; he is also novel that went deservedly unpublished. During the strike of ‘69/’70, his class an external lecturer at the University of Vienna comparative literature institute, in Samuel Becket met at Coetzee’s home once a week, giving them a chance where he teaches a B.A. thesis seminar in the folktale. He has just finished a to prove that they weren’t just dodging class but did fervently oppose the war three-year term as an American studies peer reviewer for the Fulbright pro- in Vietnam. The following year after graduation, he refused induction into the gram. His book American Romanista is on Kindle. army, something he has never once even slightly regretted. His working ca- reer has been divided into three distinct phases. After a short stint teaching in Bradley Greenburg (PhD, 2001) published his debut novel, When Lilacs Last graduate school at Arizona, he went to work for an auto parts distributor and in the Dooryard Bloomed, in September from Sandstone Press (UK). http:// eventually became national training manager. He then co-founded a business sandstonepress.com/books/when-lilacs-last-in-the-dooryard-bloomed publication on automotives that is still around today in six regional editions. Allen Dewane Harris (BA, 1993) produced the play “Miracle in Rwanda” at Lastly, he worked in the business of networking international freight forwarders the Women Playwrights International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa and has owned his own networking company for 13 years. It allows him to in July of this year. He was there at the invitation of his former UB professor, travel all over the world and yet work from his own home. Although he is past Dr. Anna Kay France. Dr. France was one of the founders of the international “retirement age,” he will work a few more years. Of course, he marvels how conference which made its premiere at the University of Buffalo back in 1988. quickly he got to this point or even that he did so at all, coming from a time when www.wpiconference.com. After leaving his former professor Dr. France and excess was the norm. Everything he has been able to achieve has been done Capetown, he then went to Grahamstown, South Africa where he produced based on an ability to communicate and the consequent reasoning capability. the play for their National Arts Festival. https://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/ While he got a good grounding at Jamestown Community College, the real events/miracle-in-rwanda/ [email protected] skills were learned at UB; and he is very glad to have had the opportunity to Julie Husband (PhD, 1999) started as Assistant Professor, English at the Uni- study there. [email protected] versity of Northern Iowa in 2000 and became head of the department in 2012. Annette M. Magid (PhD, 1991) has a new publication, Apocalyptic Projections: She was promoted to full professor in 2014. She and Jim O’Loughlin collabo- A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related rated on Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870-1900 (2003), and wrote to Film and Literature (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015). http://www.cambridg- Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary escholars.com/apocalyptic-projections Pictures (2010). She & Jim have three children - Nic, Devin, and Ian - and Christy A. McCormick (BA, 1985) by unanimous consent of the U.S. Senate, enjoy sharing their love of storytelling and outdoor life with them. was appointed in January by President Obama as a Commissioner on the U.S. Lori Jacobson (PhD, 2007) has three essays in the new anthology The Wom- Election Assistance Commission. Subsequently, her fellow commissioners en’s National Indian Association: A History (U of New Mexico P, 2015), edited elected her to be the Chairwoman of the Commission. by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Her essays are titled “’Shall We Have a Periodical?: John Marvin (PhD, 2004) was a featured reader at two events in July. Steel The Indian’s Friend”; “’Environed by Civilization’: WNIA Home-Building and Bellows: A Purely Buffalo Literary and Arts Magazine hosted John and 2 other Loan Department”; and “The WNIA and the Erotics of Reform.” poets at the Brighton Library. John also read an entirely different program of Lisa Khoury (BA, 2014) was a finalist in the nation for investigative pieces writ- poetry at Daily Planet Coffee, 1862 Hertel Ave. as part of the “Circleformance” ten by newspapers with a student population of over 10,000 for her Spectrum series. John’s work has evolved from the seminars and poetry readings of UB piece ”Heights of Fear.” She just finished an internship at ABC news in NYC professors & visiting poets and critics, including Charles Bernstein, Susan and has just started a job at YNN (Time Warner cable) in Buffalo as a news Howe, Carl Dennis, Michael Basinski, Robert Creeley, Steve McCaffery, Myung producer. Mi Kim, Joan Retallack, and others. In his work he endeavors to explore the Sang-Yule Kim (PhD, 1999), a professor of English literature at Sookmyung zone beyond narration and plot in which language seethes like virtual quarks Women’s University, Seoul, Korea, has been appointed to a cabinet position in and leptons seeking to break the laws of physics. Korea, as the senior presidential secretary for education and culture. Kelly A. Minerva (MA, 2004) successfully defended her PhD dissertation at Sharon J. Kirsch (PhD, 2004) has published two important books on Gertrude the University of Toronto and has accepted a tenure-track position at Avila Uni- Stein in 2014. She co-edited with Janet Boyd Primary Stein, Returning to the versity in Kansas City, MO.

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Randi (Bassow) Minetor (BA, 1980) recently saw the publication of her fiftieth sageCrafter.com, her company, in August 2013. She provides writing, editing book with the release of Day Trips: Hudson Valley (Globe Pequot Press, 2014). and writing coaching services to individuals and small business owners. She She is currently at work on Hiking Through History New York (FalconGuides, specializes in collaborative writing techniques that bring the best out in subject 2016) with her husband, photographer Nic Minetor, and she just completed matter experts who have devoted their lives and careers to the study of some- Robert’s Rules of Order in Action (Zephyros Press, 2015) and Extra Mile: 500 thing other than English. In July 2015, Sue began her third year volunteering as Customer Service Tips for Success (Tycho Press, 2015). Her complete book Co-VP of Communications for the San Francisco chapter of the International list can be found on her Amazon Author Page at amazon.com/author/randimi- Association of Business Communicators (IABC). In February, Sue presented netor. Randi is available for ghostwriting projects; you can reach her at randi@ as part of a panel of four at the IABC’s Leadership Institute in Orlando, Florida. minetor.com. The subject of the panel was an SF IABC special interest group, the Indepen- Nicole Murray (née Colegrove) (BA, 2001) graduated from Canisius College dent Communicators’ Roundtable. Sue welcomes contact from anyone associ- with an MS in Sport Administration 2003, and an MBA in 2015. She married ated with UB’s English Department, student or alum: http://www.themessage- fellow UB graduate Rex Murray in 2006. [email protected] crafter.com; [email protected]; [email protected] Nancy J. Parisi (BA, 1986) is about to begin her third year as a freelance Elizabeth Teebagy (BA, 2014) is attending the University of Iowa College of journalist/music reviewer for Buffalo News, unusual as the majority of music Law, ranked #22 in the country, with strong emphasis on legal writing & also a reviewers are male. She is the creator of the weekly column “Story,” and its strong public interest law program. offshoot, “Caption,” in The Public (www.dailypublic.com). She just completed Jessica Topper (nee Rosokoff) (BA, 1992) announced the June release of teaching a yearlong, iPad-based photo + words digital photo course (two class- Courtship of the Cake, her third novel of romantic women’s fiction, through es) that she created at Sacred Heart Academy in Eggertsville, New York. Berkley/Penguin. Topper resides with her husband Jonathan (BA History, 1992) Kevin Pelletier (PhD, 2007) published his first book, Apocalyptic Sentimental- in Buffalo, where they both run the music management office for the rock band ism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature (University of Georgia Press). moe. [email protected] Michael A. Uhl (BA, 1985) began work at Martin Marietta in April 1995, before Michael J. Pikus (PhD, 1994) was a staff member at the 2015 James Feni- moving to the newly merged Lockheed-Martin Marietta company--called Lock- more Cooper Society Biennial International Conference and Seminar held in heed Martin. He has supported the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Oneonta and Cooperstown, NY, this past May & June. He introduced papers (EPA) National Environmental Supercomputing Center, which EPA has since and the scholars/presenters and moderated a discussion after each scholarly renamed the Environmental Modeling and Visualization Laboratory (EMVL). panel. EMVL provides two broad areas of scientific computing support: High Perfor- Peter Ramos (PhD, 2003) has a new book of poems out: Televisions Snow mance Computing (HPC) resources and technical staff; and scientific visual- from Back Pages Books. http://www.amazon.com/Television-Snow-Peter-Ra- ization and modeling programming. He has served as manager of EMVL’s mos/dp/0615822517. [email protected] scientific visualization lab since 2000. In 2015, he lead a team of 14 scientific programmers and together they manage and support 15 different scientific re- Dan Rigney (BA, 1988) is currently working in External Affairs at Manitoga/ search projects for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. His group sup- The Russel Wright Design Center - http://www.visitmanitoga.org - the House ports areas of research ranging from modeling embryonic tissue development Studio and Landscape of mid-century industrial designer Russel Wright. He is to integrating and visualizing multi-terabyte datasets from models, satellites, also President of a small orginization, BeaconArts, http://www.beaconarts.org ground observations, and aircraft. As part of his undergraduate education at UB dedicated to promoting Beacon, NY as an arts and cultural destination in the he developed skills in technical writing, which ultimately led him into program Hudson Valley of NYS. He has lived in Beacon since 2007 with his wife, Kat management in scientific research. Stoutenborough, and 9 year old daughter, Penny. Gary Vider (BA, 2006) performed stand-up comedy on the America’s Got Tal- Jennifer Rosseland-Bates (BA, 2002) received an Ed.M. in Higher Education ent T.V. show during the summer of 2015. Administration 2015. Her goal is to continue moving up through the depart- ments in UB and would like to someday become a Director or Vice Provost. James M. Van Wyck (MA, 2008) has an article, “Benito Cereno and the Impos- She is currently seeking opportunities to research and publish concerning first- sibility of Civility” forthcoming this fall in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 88, generation and minority students. No. 3. Anthony Siu (MA, 2004; PhD, 2006) was lecturer of arts and humanities in Roland Vegso (PhD, 2007) was appointed the Susan J. Rosowksi Associate various schools in Hong Kong and was given tenure at Hong Kong Community Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, for the next five College in 2008 and then Assistant Professor of English at Hang Seng Man- years. agement College in 2011. He attended Cornell’s School of Theory and Criti- Lia Vella (PhD, 2002) is an Instruction and Research Services Librarian at cism in 2014. His book review of Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Colorado School of Mines since 2011, where she finds herself using the teach- Vulnerability in Literature and Film was accepted by Film-Philosophy and is ing skills she honed at UB on a daily basis. Although she still finds engineering forthcoming. Recently, he left academia and took up events and social media faculty and students something of a mystery, she is excited to work with Liberal management in the entertainment business after teaching for 9 years. Arts faculty who specialize in science and technology in literature. Lia lives in Jessica Smith (BA, 2002; MA, 2005) Her second book of poetry, Life-List, was Golden, CO, with her partner, Bo, and their 2-year-old daughter, Maya. published by Chax Press in April 2015. Albert Wachtel (PhD, 1968) has a new article out on the painful necessity of Lisa Stahl (BA, English and Anthropology, 1974) now writes for an online digi- and deficiency of the most current film on the Holocaust. It’s available at:http:// tal publication, Beauty and Well Being, where she was recently promoted to a www.algemeiner.com/2015/05/27/never-forget-but-dont-stay-trapped-in-the- staff writer. She has had 7 or 8 publications in the last 6 or 7 months on fashion past/: [email protected] & art, several book reviews on gourmet French cooking, Ayurvedia Yogic phi- Janelle Aisha Wells (BA, 2002) is originally from Long Island, NY. She is mar- losophy of nutrition, sleep disorders, and an interview with a prominent sleep ried to Craig Opie, Chief in the US Navy, and she is currently pregnant with her disorder specialist, Dr. Ana Krieger. She is now covering art happenings in NYC first child. She received an MA in English Literature with a specialty in Gender for the July issue. Her publications total 63 - in digital and print magazines. and Ethnicity Studies from UCF in 2009. She taught 5 years (2008-2013) at Danny Stone (BA, 2009) had his second novel, Then Comes the Harvest, Seminole State College in Florida. Currently, she is a professor at Honolulu published in October 2014, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ Community College. Then-Comes-Harvest-Danny-Stone/dp/0990813320. Proceeds from the book Aimee Woznick (BA, 2005) went on to earn her MA (2006) & PhD (2010) in will fund a one-time scholarship at his high school to be given to a graduating English (19th-century U.S. Literature) at the University of California, Santa Bar- senior entering college for humanities. He is an ESL teacher, a French teacher, bara. After a stint directing the Academic Success Center at Villa Maria College and a fiction writer living in New Haven, Connecticut. He belongs to a commu- in Buffalo, she is now Director of Academic Support (WNY region) & Assistant nity chorus and is engaged to be married this fall. Professor of English at SUNY Empire State College. She lives in Buffalo with Susan (Glaeser) Stoney (MA, 1983) concentrated on creative writing while her husband, Kevin Newman, who is also a UB grad. Aimee.Woznick@esc. at UB. After almost 25 years in corporate marketing communications at four edu. companies and in four different industries, she became Principal of TheMes-

Department of English/2015-16 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish 14 @UB_English www.english.buffalo.edu Emeriti

Gary Earl Ross (BA, 1973; MAH, 1975) retired from the UB Educational Op- Professor Emeritus Fountain Pen” publishedHoward in R. Wolf portunity Center in 2013 and has devoted himself to writing and sometimes , had his article “Today I Am A directing. An Edgar Award-winning member of Mystery Writers of America, he creative writing (2015). He willColere lecture, Coe this College’s fall on “The journal Responsibilities of multi-cultural of has published three stories in the past year: “Sister Bessie’s Boys” in the Cleis the Writer in the Post-World War II Period” at eight Warburg Chapters of Press anthology Darker Edge of Desire, “Beneath the Ice” in the mystery journal the American Council on Germany. His three-act play, Over My Dead Body, and “Good Neighbors” in the forthcoming Akashic Press the Day, is forthcoming in late 2015. anthology Buffalo Noir. Home at the End of He has also directed Katrori Hall’s Martin Luther King play The Mountaintop in February 2014, and his own The Guns of Christmas in December 2014, both Neil Schmitz’s “Mark Twain” for the Subversive Theatre Collective, where he was recently named Associate Professor Emeritus A Artistic Director. The Guns of Christmas recently received the Emanuel Fried is Chapter 18 in the Cambridge University, edited Press by Outstanding New Play Award. Ross is at work on Nickel City Blues, the first History of American Civil War Literature novel of the Gideon Rimes mystery series set in Buffalo, and will direct his own Coleman Hutchinson. courtroom drama, The Mark of Cain, at Subversive in 2016. In Memoriam

John G. Dings, Jan. 13, 1939 – Oct. 28, 2014 John Garetson Dings, 75, a member of the English department faculty for more than three decades, died Oct. 28 in his home in Boulder, Colorado, of Parkin- son’s disease complicated by the effects of a fall. Colleagues, former students and family alike call him a teacher in the finest sense of the word, with a kind, thoughtful style that was never pedantic.A lifelong environmentalist, they say Dings shared with them a sense of wonder and delight in the beauty of literature and the world around us. Born in Covina, California, Dings attended high school in Denver. He received a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1961 and in 1968, a PhD from Cornell University, where he specialized in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Dings’ book on the poet, “The mind in its place: Wordsworth, ‘Michael’ and the poetry of 1800,” was published in 1973 by the Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur at the University of Salzburg and reflects the deep interest of both poet and author in the natural environment. It is not coincidental that Wordsworth’s politics, like Dings’, were fundamentally “green.” In fact, he was our first truly ecological poet and exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements. Many observers, including Dings, have found him of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. After teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Dings joined the UB faculty in 1968. He taught Victorian literature and courses on literature and the environment until 2001, when he retired and moved to Boulder to be close to his family and the mountains he loved. Dings held a number of administrative positions at UB, including associate chair and chair of the English department, associate dean of undergraduate education and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, later incorporated into the College of Arts and Sciences. He also was a master of UB’s Rachel Carson College, served on the university’s Environmental Task Force and was a key member of the UB Graduate Group for Marxist Studies. James Holstun, professor of English, called Dings “a rare combination of high principles and good humor: fearless, witty, passionate about literature, beloved by his students and colleagues. He was from Colorado and continued to be a mountain boy all his life, as evidenced in his environmental teaching.” Holstun’s comments were echoed by several colleagues. William Fischer, associate professor emeritus and a colleague and close friend of Dings for 30 years, calls him “a wise and compassionate human being who cared deeply for his family, for the community of his friends and for the great natural world around him that he loved and fought to protect.” Other former students and colleagues speak to his influence on them as well, including James Swan, emeritus associate professor of English, who wrote a lengthy and warm remembrance for the English department’s website; former student Susan Nygaard of the Marshall School in Duluth, Minnesota, and UB Associate Professor Stacy Hubbard, who said, “Over my years at UB I have been guided by the question: ‘What would John do?’” Another former student, Joseph Brennan, former UB associate vice president for university communications and now vice president for strategic communica- tion at the University of Iowa, notes that Dings was his dissertation director “and I had the pleasure and privilege to have been his student for many years. He was compassionate, good-natured and caring, and had a strong sense of social justice, coupled with a broad view of the world and the ability to listen respect- fully to all points of view, even those that he didn’t share.” “John was a modest man,” says Prudence Dings, his wife of 53 years. “He favored jeans and a plaid shirt, had a ready smile for everyone, loved babies, played the piano and additional instruments for enjoyment, and sang enthusiastically in quartets and barbershop groups. “He enjoyed a good conversation, a great book, every imaginable pun, games and, above all else, his family,” she says. “He paid attention to detail, whether it was the text of a novel, the way the light caught a leaf, the planting of a garden, the course of a hike — in fact, Dings was an avid hiker who continued to walk extensively until the last month of his life — the mechanics of a car, the arguments of a political debate. He brought a keen intellect to every situation, along with a kind heart and a sense of humor.” Contributions in Dings’ memory can be made to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation or the Rocky Mountain National Park. Published in Fort Wayne Newspapers on May 21, 2015

R. Mark Keaton, Sept. 16, 1963 - May 13, 2015 R. Mark Keaton, passed away on Wednesday, May 13, 2015, in the care of Hospice at his parents’ home in Buffalo, N.Y. He was born on Sept. 16, 1963, in Logan, W.Va. Mark.earned his BA from the University at Buffalo where he was awarded the Arthur A. Axlerod Memorial Prize for Poetry, and was a founding member of Generation Magazine. He received his Juris Doctor from Maurer School of Law Indiana University Bloomington where he served as an editor on the Indiana Law Journal. He practiced law with Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, Ill., Damon & Morey in Buffalo, N.Y. and Baker & Daniels in Fort Wayne before establish- ing an independent practice. He coached Little League at Foster Park and was an avid golfer. He will be remembered for his keen intellect and generous spirit. Mark was a devoted writer, mentor and friend. He is survived by his children, Adriana Rae, Adam Marshall and Emily Claire Keaton; parents, Ronald and Karen Keaton; brother, Paul Keaton (Rozlyn Rader); sister, Rebekah Keaton (Terrance Peterson); nephews, Maxwell and Henry Peterson; and grandmother Ruby Keaton. Published in Fort Wayne Newspapers on May 21, 2015

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Upcoming Events ..... OCTOBER: Recommended Reading.... 2 - Transcription/Transliteration/Translation: Fields For Experimentation - The Poetry Collec- tion, 4th Floor, Capen Hall We asked some English faculty to recommend a few good books. 8 - 10 - Pain Conference, Honors College, Capen Hall & Center for the Arts (Screening Here’s what they came up with. Room) https://painconference.wordpress.com/ 9 - Polyhedrons of Scripture: Translation(s), Multilingualisms, and the Single Text - The Rachel Ablow: Jennifer Evans, Welcome to the Goon Squad (2011). Poetry Collection, 4th Floor, Capen Hall David Allf: Graham Swift, Waterland (2014). NOVEMBER: 9 - Martino Stierli “The Visuality of Space and the Space of Vision: On Miles van der Rohe’s Dimitri Anastasopoulos: Julio Cortazar, Fantomas and the Multinational Photomontages”, Darwin Martin House, Greatbatch Pavilion, 125 Jewett Parkway Vampires (1975; English translation 2015) 13 - Mark Doty - Oscar Silverman Reading, 672 Delaware Ave. (Butler Mansion) Barbara Bono: Jim Shapiro, Shakespeare in America (2014). APRIL: Carrie Bramen: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015). 8 - Robert Creeley Lecture & Celebration of Poetry, Albright-Knox Gallery 8 - 9 - English Dept. Alumuni/ae Reunion in Buffalo! Bob Daly: Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (2012). 9 - 10 - “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years” Anniversary Conference Stacy Hubbard: Mary Lee Settle, I, Roger Williams (2001). THE BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 31/FALL 2015 Christina Milletti: The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector (2015). Dipson Amherst Theatre, 3500 Main Street, Buffalo, NY • Tuesdays at 7:00pm Randy Schiff: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977). Oct. 13 - Lawrence Kasden, Body Heat, 1981 Oct. 20 - Costa-Gavras, Missing, 1982 David Schmid: William T.Vollman, Last Stories and Other Stories (2014). Oct. 27 - Roland Joffé, The Mission, 1986 Nov. 3 - Mira Nair, Mississippi Masala, 1991 Nov. 10 - Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke, 1997 Nov. 17 - Elia Suleiman, The Time That Remains, 2009 FIND US ON THE WEB... Nov. 24 - Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, 2009 Dec. 1 - Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse, 2011 Be sure to check out the Dec. 8 - Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway English Department on Facebook! to Heaven, 1946 www.facebook.com/UBEnglish Further information at: http://buffalofilmseminars.com Follow us on Twitter: Check out our website for more information on Upcoming Events: @UB_English http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/news-events/upcoming_events.html

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